Big White Moths or Flowers?

I remember the first time I saw this tree. I was in Kampong Cham town on the river road looking for a restaurant. It was dark already, the town quiet, and the Mekong River below was silent even as it heaved it's slow way to Vietnam and the Pacific. It was just the beginning of the dry season, but even then the water levels are dramatically low, and sluggish with silt.

It was a beautiful night, the kind that prompts childhood memories in a former country-boy like me, and I was aware of how my motorcycle headlights illuminated the undersides of the trees that arced overhead. I felt a calmness that deepened as the small macadam road and trees that templed it were transformed into a tunnel. I remember the distinct impression of large white moths pendant from the trees, like bats in a cave, suddenly illuminated by an intruder. I slowed and looked more closely. The same impression. I knew my middle-aged eyes are not that great, though even now I don't need glasses, but it was full on dark. I told myself I would come back the next day, but it was another dry season before I had the time and memory to do so.

On a recent trip to Kampong Cham, almost a year after exactly, again early in the dry season, and along that same road parralleling the Mekong, I looked for the trees again. In the daytime it was easy to see that they are a type of legume--the long seed pods, the pinnate leaves are typical--and that the white moths were in fact the somewhat sparsely scattered but large, white, pea-flower shaped blossoms the tree bears.

A kind older man, who has a small shop across the narrow road in Chieu Theal Sr'ut where I stopped to take these photographs explained that the tree was called Daem Angkia Day. I was surprised by the village's name but also interested because we are planting Chieu Theal saplings we have grown from seed on our land in Ratanakiri. The Chieu Theal is a magnificent tree, encountered by tourists among the temples of Angkor Wat (or along its roads), but it has been cut down, logged out, in much of Cambodia, as it was here.

There are "none left," he said.

This elder told me that the village was famous because it adjoined a lake, the Boeung Chieu where an ancient King, Samdech Jong Koin Eing, had built a palace. "A thousand years ago," he said. I wondered if that could be the King that the current Prime Minister claims to be the reincarnation of, a leader who, like the Prime Minister, was from Kampong Cham and who rose from humble beginnings to ultimate power.

Have to check on that. :)

As in most areas where all the older, naturally occuring trees have long been cut down, what remains has practical uses. This is true of the Angkia Day which is actually quite unimpressive, except for its blossoms and perhaps only if you mistake them for something else.

If you have ever seen the Chieu Theal, you would have to agree that this village got the bad end of that trade; the picture on the right was taken on the grounds of the Takeo Province Angkor-Era Temple, at Tonlee Bati.

Angkia Day's leaves are used to season two Khmer soups, samlah gaa kao and samlah gaa koo, and its flowers, which might look, in the right conditions and in the right mood :), like large white moths, are also eaten.